Best Small Press New York 2009 - Melville House

Melville House's 2008 leap across the Hudson River from Hoboken to DUMBO means they're fully ours now, and Amen. There is no shortage of small and independent presses in New York City, but Melville House—whose stable includes both an avant-fiction wing, of the Tao Lin/Stephen Dixon variety, and a lively political nonfiction roster that includes Mark Danner, Renata Adler, and Andre Schiffrin—is so firmly the best of them that one wonders what everyone else is doing wrong. Even Melville's in-house design team dominates its field. The house's upcoming books include cartoonist and critic David Stromberg's graphic novel Baddies and a reissue of New Yorker contributor Lore Segal's Lucinella novella, a long-beloved send-up of literary New York that, had it been written in this century, would surely have made room for its own little Melville House cameo.